Halfbakery: Purely functional programming with heat output

Summary

h a l f b a k e r yAlmost as great as sliced bread. add, search, annotate, link, view, overview, recent, by name, random news, help, about, links, report a problem browse anonymously, or get an account and write. register, login I don't know where to put this, but it also applies to the ALGOL 60 standard, which has no I/O capability. Purely functional programming, as I understand it, has no side-effects. All it does, ideally, is take and return values. This is thermodynamically suspect. What must surely be happening is that the computer sits there and gets hot when it processes data. Heat is output and a side-effect, so thermodynamically it appears that functional programming is as impossible as a perpetual motion machine. That said, there are apparently logic gates which never lose information but that's not something I currently understand. Once again that seems thermodynamically suspect. In the physical world, a device running a purely functional program just is going to get hotter and its heat will vary according to how intense its processing is. This means that it really is possible to design a functional program with no side-effects from the perspective of processing at all. When it comes to output time, binary data can be converted to serial form and then output as follows: 1 is intense computing which heats up the CPU a lot, and 0 is less intense computing which doesn't change the temperature much. Then, aim some kind of temperature-measuring device, also known as a thermometer but not the mercury or alcohol kind so much as one of those gun things for taking temperature remotely, and monitor fluctuations in temperature, probably more the rate of heating or cooling than actual temperature or heat, and you have an output technique for a purely functional program, and for something running ALGOL 60. No input though. Presumably the input could be a cigarette lighter applied to the circuitry? It's an existential angst engine; we see that it struggles, but those s...